True Grit

First on UK BBC1 on Christmas Day 1974 and shown again many times since has meant I never bothered taping this classic - now I've seen it umpteen times it still leaves me smiling. The relentlessly eccentric badinage between the 3 main characters and others should be enough to make anyone smile, even with a little violence and a few serious points raised along the way.

A tough man on a tough hunt for a gang of toughs - it's John Wayne's film all the way, with this he passed into his last phase in the saddle with a continuous wink at the cowboy parody he had become and which no-one else will ever match. By now after 40 years he was an American legend, your giant avuncular instant-lawman starring in his next horse opera - True Grit would really be nothing special without him, with the fat old man it's a nice Western comedy. We in the audience knew he had Grit before he came on, Kim Darby was just too slow on the uptake. I never understood why the script was so uncharitable to the Texican horse-killing son of a bitch Campbell, he's belittled right up to the scenes in Mattie's family graveyard.

Overall a shot in the arm (or leg!) if seen every few years - even in 1969 entertaining action films could still be made!

I do not think this is John Wayne's best movie or role, but I did like this movie, though I do not think it is perfect. While the film starts and ends very well, the film slackens in the pace in the middle. My other flaws are to do with casting. Glen Campbell is adequate in his role, but I was never engrossed by his character and he never quite make me believe in him. Worst though was Kim Darby, I am not going to go through a debate about whether she was too old for the role(I'll drop a hint, I think she was), but for me she is one of the blandest and most annoying leading ladies in a John Wayne movie.

However, the film does look great. Handsomely shot with great scenery, True Grit is pleasing to the eye. Elmer Bernstein's score is rousing and very fitting, while the story is interesting, most of the characters are credible and the script flows well. Also True Grit is very well directed, and there is a glorious final shoot-out. Other than Campbell and Darby, the other acting is fine. While I would have not personally given the Oscar to this particular performance(I thought he was better in The Searchers, Red River and The Quiet Man) John Wayne is excellent here, and while he doesn't appear until quite later on Robert Duvall also makes a positive impression.

All in all, a very good film but could have been better in my view. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Now personally there are John Wayne performances in terms of acting that I like better than True Grit. Among others Fort Apache, The Searchers, Red River, The Horse Soldiers, to name a few. And certain films like The Commancheros and McLintock and Big Jake I find to be more entertaining.

What True Grit does is succeed on both levels, being both great entertainment and giving John Wayne the acting role of a lifetime in the person of Rooster Cogburn.

Mattie Ross from Darnell and Yell County Arkansas personified by Kim Darby has come to Fort Smith seeking the killer of her father Jeff Corey. Turns out he's also killed a State Senator in Texas so Texas Ranger Glen Campbell informs her. Both of them team up with United States Marshal Rooster Cogburn who resides in Fort Smith with Chin Lee and my favorite movie cat, General Sterling Price.

Corey is now in the outlaw band headed by Robert Duvall at large in the Indian Nation Territory that became Oklahoma. True Grit's plot is the trio's pursuit of Duvall, Corey and the rest of the gang.

But oddly enough True Grit isn't really about plot. It's about the creation of a character. Like Margaret Mitchell who wrote Gone With the Wind with Clark Gable in mind for Rhett Butler, Charles Portis wrote the novel True Grit with only John Wayne in mind as Rooster Cogburn. It must have been one singular delight for Charles Portis to see the Duke flesh out Rooster Cogburn exactly as he conceived him.

Tough old Rooster, likes an occasional drink, isn't above a little larceny, but has one stern moral code about real bad guys. Bring him in dead or alive and make sure you shoot first coming up against them. And he's got quite the colorful past as he relates tales of his younger days to Campbell and Darby on the trail.

In other reviews I've said that John Wayne had one of the great faces for movie closeups. You can see a perfect example of that in that scene with John Fiedler who plays Darby's lawyer J. Noble Daggett. A man who rates high in the legal profession in that area having forced a railroad into bankruptcy.

The camera is facing Fiedler as he's talking to Wayne about his visit with Darby who's life Wayne saved. Wayne's got about a third of his face to the camera. But even with that third, your eyes are focused on the Duke and his reactions and then as the camera slowly pans around to Wayne in full face his reaction shots are hysterical. You don't work with scene stealing character actors like Chill Wills, Walter Brennan, and Gabby Hayes for 30 years without learning something.

John Wayne was up against some stiff competition in 1969 for the Best Actor Oscar. It was his second nomination, the first being for Sands of Iwo Jima. He was facing Richard Burton as Henry VIII in Anne of a Thousand Days and a couple of newcomers named Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight for Midnight Cowboy. He was certainly the sentimental favorite.

If in no other place in our lives, sentiment does have its place in cinema. It was an honor well deserved, not just for one performance but for a lifetime of achievement in cinema being the player who put more people into movie seats than any other person ever. So many of the Duke's contemporaries like Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power were never even nominated for an Oscar much less win one.

Because the Motion Picture Academy has deemed this John Wayne's grandest cinematic achievement, it's almost a command to support this fine western and the man who defined the western hero and is still defining it.

What is a Western? The genre conjures up images of gun totting cowboys, reckless outlaws and fierce encounters in countryside saloons. True, this was the setting that prevailed during the 19th century American West.

A few directors in the past have tried to present the West in a more refined way, giving importance to the settings and the characterization. Among them is Henry Hathaway's True Grit, an emotionally charged Western about a fearless; one-eyed Marshall named Rooster Cogburn.

The film very stylishly brings to fore the Western countryside, from the scenario at a public hanging to the courtroom drama. In the latter we see some tense and heated exchange of words between the prosecuting lawyer and the Marshall.

The intriguing plot unfolds itself very nicely on the silver screen. The story is simple. Tom Cheney, a cowboy, kills his employer. Maddie (Kim Darby), the headstrong daughter of the employer, vows to take revenge and get Cheney hanged for the murder of her father. For the mission she enlists the support of one Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne). Now this Rooster is the meanest Marshall in the entire territory. Having lost one of his eyes in the war, he is totally fearless in disposition, talks brazenly and has an unconventional sense of humor. Despite his hardened exterior, he is warm and benevolent at heart. This is evident in the conversations between him and Maddie.

The third angle to the mission comes in the form of Sgt Lebeof (Glen Campbell), an enthusiastic Texas Ranger, who is after Cheney for his own motive of collecting ransom money. At first instance, Maddie has reservations about Lebeof. He comes across as an ill mannered, uncivilized guy to her. Convinced that Maddie will not make him a party to the pursuit of Cheney, Lebeof, secretively, unknowing from her, teams up with Rooster. He takes Rooster into confidence and through him manages an entry into the chase for Cheney.

The character of Lebeof is an interesting study. He comes across as an inexperienced person who has a knack for saying something silly all the times. He is rebuked many times for such uttering by both Maddie and Rooster.

Rooster had his own reasons for going after Cheney. It so happened that this Cheney was an accomplice of ‘Lucky' Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall) and Rooster had some unfinished business with Ned. He recently had shot Ned in the lower lip during a confrontation but Ned had escaped. Now this chase provided Rooster with another shot at Ned.

The chase is beautifully picturized. Especially the final confrontation between Ned's gang and Rooster. The action sequence in this scene must be seen to be believed.

The reverberating and sweet music score by Elmer Bernstein forms an integral part of the plot. Glen Campbell has rendered the opening title song in his trademark voice. True Grit is a treat to watch for its believable depiction of the life and times of the West. Henry Hathaway, a specialist director of the crime, western and thriller genre has masterfully directed this flick. Re-uniting with Wayne after Sons of Katie Elder (1965), he has managed to extract the very best from his leading man. John Wayne has essayed the role of his lifetime. It is impossible to imagine anybody but him in the lead role as a tough, uncouth and drunken Marshall. Interestingly, Wayne won his only Oscar for this role in 1970.

"Come see a fat old man sometime!"

John Wayne's parting comment in this film is directed as much at us the viewers as it is at the young woman his Rooster Cogburn character is addressing. In a way, Wayne throughout the film plays off the image he cemented in dozens of great and near-great westerns, with a nod that by 1969, he along with the western genre had fallen behind the times, that his shoot-first approach to law and order had worn thin with the critical establishment just as it does in Judge Parker's courtroom.

In that way, playing a character of such dogged homicidal cussedness as the hard-drinking, one-eyed ex-Quantrill Raider Rooster Cogburn and giving him a teenaged girl seeking justice to play off so as to showcase his essential decency seems a clever means to win Wayne an Oscar, which he finally did here, a sentimental triumph over some more heralded performances. With such an attitude, you might think "True Grit" would come off a bit of a one-trick pony 37 years on. But it doesn't. In many ways, both the film and Wayne's performance come off better than ever.

Helping matters a lot is the support Wayne receives from two women. As the heroine, Matty Ross, Kim Darby provides Wayne with a fantastic foil, doughty to the point of rudeness, forever finding fault in others but earning your good will through her simple faith in justice and loyalty to the memory of her slain father, for whom she wants Rooster's help avenging. As she is told by a horse dealer she banters with: "I admire your sand."

The other is Marguerite Roberts, whose adaptation of Charles Portis' novel bristles with good humor and an ear for the period. "If ever I meet one of you Texas waddies who ain't drunk water from a hoofprint, I think I'll... I'll shake their hand or buy 'em a Daniel Webster cee-gar," Rooster tells his braggart riding companion, a young Texas Ranger played by country singer and ex-Beach Boy Glen Campbell.

Campbell may be a novice and a third wheel in the interplay between Wayne and Darby, but he acquits himself well and delivers a worthy performance in a cast stacked with talented actors like Robert Duvall, Jeremy Slate, and Strother Martin, not to mention Dennis Hopper, hiding the long hair he made famous in "Easy Rider" that same year. Some of these actors portray bad guys, but Roberts' script and director Henry Hathaway's languid pacing allow them to present some humanizing qualities that go a long way toward making "True Grit" more than your typical shoot-em-up oater.

Even Jeff Corey, who plays a no-account named Chaney who shot Matty's father, has a funny scene when he tells Matty how to cock her pistol, then whines after she shoots him with it: "Everything happens to me!"

About the only fault I can find with the film is Elmer Bernstein's bombastic score, which employs overly ornate orchestration like kettledrums when Matty has her showdown with Chaney and is tuneless apart from the title song, which is Campbell's best moment here. Hathaway's direction is somewhat pedestrian but serves the script, and showcases some incredible autumnal vistas of tall birch and pine where Rooster and Matty search for Chaney, photographed by Lucien Ballard in a style akin to (but more dreamy than) his work on the same year's "The Wild Bunch."

1969 was the last great year for westerns, with this, "The Wild Bunch," "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid," "Support Your Local Sheriff" and "Once Upon A Time In the West," and its interesting how Ballard, Corey, and Strother Martin turned up in more than one of them. But good westerns never really go out of style, they just sit on the shelf awhile like an old Stetson waiting to be rediscovered. Nobody wore a Stetson better, or deserved an Oscar more, than John Wayne. "True Grit" does the double duty of showing why he was a star and further burnishing his luster.